The Museum Show Has An Ego Disorder

By Margaret Talbot

Published: October 11, 1998

Correction Appended

This week, the Library of Congress will open the doors of its Thomas Jefferson Building for the largest exhibit ever assembled on the life and work of Sigmund Freud. If the Library's estimates are correct, by the time the show closes on Jan. 16, more than a quarter million people will have inspected Freud's handwritten case notes on immortal patients like the Rat Man, the famous letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in which Freud renounces the so-called seduction theory and dozens of other manuscripts and first editions from the library's vast collection of Freudiana. Visitors will see the actual chair Dr. Freud used in his examining room, the actual kilim rug that draped the iconic couch, his actual spectacles and a phalanx of the antiquities Freud collected and arrayed with fetishistic precision on his desk.

What makes this exhibit remarkable, however, is not so much the objects in it as the fact that it is happening at all. In the jagged cardiogram that is the history of Freud's reputation, 1998 is not, after all, a peak. Managed care has been notoriously inhospitable to long-term psychotherapy and notoriously hospitable to the quicker, cheaper fixes of behavior mod and Prozac. The steady drip-drip of Freud criticism over the past decade -- attacks on his personal character, his originality, his therapeutic models and his scientific status -- has corroded the cultural prestige psychoanalysis once enjoyed among American intellectuals.

Moreover, the Freud show could just as easily have been doomed by the increasingly contentious politics of museum curatorship as by the anti-Freudian zeitgeist -- and for a time it looked as if it would be. Museums -- especially history museums -- are now subject, in unprecedented degree, to the scrutiny and pressure tactics of interest groups, many of which insist on being heard at the earliest planning stages of a show and, more and more successfully, on getting their point of view incorporated into exhibits. Witness the fate of the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space museum, drastically altered after veterans complained that it portrayed the Japanese as victims and failed to credit the bombing of Hiroshima with ending the war. Or the exhibit of 19th- and 20th-century photographs called ''Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation,'' scheduled by the Library of Congress to open two years ago but canceled entirely after a group of African-American library staff members complained that the images it contained -- of slaves and slave quarters -- were offensive. Or the recent Smithsonian exhibit on the history of sweatshops, which drew indignant protests from clothing industry lobbyists; they didn't like the fact that the mock-up of a sweatshop featured in the show happened to be one that made not cigars or trinkets but apparel. The dust-up over ''Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture'' came just after the Enola Gay and ''Big House'' protests, and seemed to presage a similar end. In the

Summer of 1995, about a year after the library appointed a guest curator and scheduled the exhibit, an independent researcher and irrepressible Freud skeptic named Peter Swales rallied about 50 other scholars, most of whom had published work critical of Freud, to sign a petition. The show's planning committee, the petitioners complained, was stacked with psychoanalytic apologists and its goal, as one of the signatories put it in an interview, was simply ''to polish up the tarnished image of a business'' -- psychoanalysis -- ''that's heading into Chapter 11.'' The petition said nothing about canceling or even postponing the exhibit. But in December of that year, when the library suddenly announced that it was delaying the show indefinitely, the decision was widely perceived as a capitulation to the petitioners and to the threat of controversy. The library's own explanation -- that it had run short of funds -- convinced virtually no one writing about the story at the time.

''Underlying the attempt to block the Freud exhibit was a particularly dangerous notion: that an institution owned by the Government should avoid doing anything controversial,'' wrote the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. In the pages of The New Republic, the sociologist Todd Gitlin declared that, just as it had in the case of the ''Back of the Big House'' show, the library had ''chosen suppression over exhibition, silencing over debate.''

As it turns out, the story is more complicated than that. For one thing, it now looks as if the library did delay the exhibit primarily for financial reasons -- it was $350,000 shy of the $900,000 budget projected for the exhibit, and this was not the first or last time that it had postponed shows for lack of funds. Moreover, the Freud petitioners had not mobilized the support of members of Congress, as the Enola Gay protesters had, nor did their objections pivot on racial sensitivities, patriotism or the kind of populist, defense-of-decency politics that drove the disputes over art-museum shows like the one devoted to Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. For these reasons, the library could afford not to yield to them.

Margaret Talbot is a senior editor at The New Republic. Her last piece for the magazine was about orphans adopted from eastern Europe.

Correction: October 11, 1998, Sunday An article on page 56 of The Times Magazine today, about a new Freud exhibition at the Library of Congress, omits credits for the photographs and documents used in the illustrations. The photographs should be attributed to the Library of Congress, courtesy of A.W. Freud et al., and the documents to Mark Paterson & Associates/Collection of the Library of Congress.